Metabolic and morphological evaluation of an artificial full-thickness skin model using a multimodal photonic system

The fabrication of artificial tissue and organ models is one of the important directions of the development of modern biomedicine. Assessment of the morphology, maturation, and viability is an important part of such developments. Here, we report on the validation of our custom-build fluorescence spectroscopy (FS) system with optical coherence tomography (OCT) for assessing the metabolism and morphology of the full-thickness skin equivalence (FSE) model. FS along with OCT has been used for the metabolic activity evaluation of the developed FSE model and 3D imaging of its structure. Thus, we have developed a multimodal optical system that can be used in the future for a full-profile assessment of the maturation and viability of 3D-printed models of biological tissues in time-course development.